Gentoo, x86_64, x.org 7.2 and evdev – input problems

After fighting a losing battle trying to get x.org 7.2 working on my machine, a nice chap over at the gentoo forums was able to help me solve the issue.

In a nutshell:

1. Make sure “hal” and “dbus” USE flags are set in make.conf.
2. Re-emerge xorg-server if they weren’t.
3. Change the “driver” names for keyboard/mouse devices to “evdev” in xorg.conf.
4. ???
5. Profit.

A snippet from my xorg.conf input sections might help:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier     ”Mouse0″
Driver         ”evdev”
Option         ”Protocol”
Option         ”Device” “/dev/input/event5″
Option         ”Emulate3Buttons” “no”
Option         ”ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier     ”Keyboard0″
Driver         ”evdev”
Option      “Device”        “/dev/input/event3″
EndSection

To get the evdev event addresses (/dev/input/event3 etc) just use “cat /proc/bus/input/devices | more” and look for your keyboard vendor… my Apple keyboard showed up twice, only one of the two events worked. A little bit of trial-and-error there and you should be up and running.

The full thread is available on the Gentoo forums.

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mount.cifs and permissions problems under ubuntu linux

Recently, I’ve had an issue using mount.cifs from the command line in linux to mount shares, on Ubuntu Linux (as a client).

The problem was, mounting a samba share using CIFS and using only the samba username/password would render the entire mount unwriteable, except by root.

The dead simple solution to this is as follows.

Instead of doing just this:

mount.cifs //<server>/<share> -ouser=<username>,pass=<password>

Try this:

mount.cifs //<server>/<share> -ouid=<localuser>,gid=<localgroup>,user=<username>,pass=<password>

So if your samba username is joe.bloggs, and your username and group on your local machine are just “joe”, you’d do this:

mount.cifs //<server>/<share> -ouid=joe,gid=joe,user=joe.bloggs,pass=<password>

This simply tells CIFS that user ‘joe’ on the local machine should be the owner of the mounted share, and then subject to whatever permissions the samba server has set.

Easy as!

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